Greetings Economists, Gore Vidal was writing about Lincoln and made this comment about morality;
Vidal writes, Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off. Finally, as the Civil War got more and more bloody, he began to adjure Heaven and the Almighty though not any particular creed. On this point Tripp makes much of Lincoln's preference for ethics over morality. The first word comes from the Latin for "customs" and the second from the Greek for "customs," but there is a world of difference between the two words. Morality, with which Lincoln had little to do, is religious-based, which means that in the name of religion, say, homosexuality could be proscribed as immoral and was while ethics tends to deal with law, cause and effect, logic, empiricism. Tripp writes, "Since boyhood Lincoln displayed a marked capacity to see the big picture in life and to not be swerved aside by smaller (moral) considerations." This already sounds much like ethics, based on widely shared values and poles apart from the petty differences honored by opposite sides of the (proverbial) railroad tracks. Doyle, That's how I see morality as well. The conventional wisdom of the majority of peoples toward what is good or bad behavior. Carrol brings up contingency as a factor in trying to understand where capitalism comes from. I agree with that as fundamental to understanding this issue. I would add also that emotion structure is what makes barbarity possible. The scale of mayhem changes with time as societies organize themselves on larger and larger scales. Communal societies as far as a I know were as apt to kill their neighbors as anyone else. The question is why? That's where morality fails us. One can say morally one ought not to kill, or adapt as did Gandhi and M L King non-violence. But that substitutes voluntary forms over what already exists. And depends upon the pre-existing forms to abide by the efforts of a Gandhi. Since both persons were assassinated the solution they offered had defects. Morality is behavior modification by communal attitudes toward certain sorts of behavior. Since the law and ethics modify the voluntary control citizens exercise with force from the cops we assume that's the next best thing to insure morality works. The cops say the more surveillance the more control over deviant behavior. It's my view the problem lies in how we understand emotion structure in society. Everyone feels angry? Well some disabled people don't but we are trying to capture what angry people might do. And just focusing on anger and murder makes this clear. The law assumes we can manage our anger. So that no matter who you are, you won't kill someone when they make you angry. If you do something then, assault someone then the law takes your act as against the law. The law can't exercise judgment before the act for the most part though conspiracies are sometime prosecuted if someone will confess or there is other evidence of criminal intent. In my view capitalism did not exist prior to Europe's national construction of capitalism, but it would have likely emerged in China, or India, if not Europe. That is because Capitalism is an outgrowth of scale of production, is a systemic aspect of society. Small communal societies in isolation can't envision what that means in relation to their neighbors. Further the logic of unequal development, and unequal social relations depends upon preventing some people questioning the existing social relations. Equality amongst people tears apart the relations of production in Capitalism. So in small societies forces that remove barriers of inequality face the relatively poor powers of production that those who assume power and the means to define inequality can muster. The crudity of power relations in pre-capitalist societies shows us how difficult it is to understand protecting inequality in a systemic way is. Moral structure that could work in a global system has to take into account the manufacturing of passionate states of mind. It is not so much that we want to use the law to stop people from killing each other, as that we define the structure of behavior so that conflicting needs, conflicting desires, and conflicting rational thoughts interact with each other without arbitrarily shutting down opposing forces. To put in plain language how does one deal with Hitler without killing Hitler? There are two basic parts to that, given the law, we wait until Hitler commits mass murder to judge Hitler. Were the individual Hitler to imagine mass murder, we don't judge Hitler guilty, we judge him responsible for his actions when they are actually mass murder. We are then asking in the second part how large social forces can not commit murder. Since the U.S. will use it's power to protect itself we have to understand a way to break it up without resorting to the barbarity that Charles is bringing up here. I would say that is directly linked to emotion structure and how we understand producing emotion structure in society. I go along with certain sorts of concepts here like dysfunctional family structure and individual abuse. From these roots does Capitalism arise. thanks, Doyle
